Celebrating Client & Reader Books of 2022

Hi Manuscript Workers,

Is your brain fried as we approach the end of the year? Would it be fun to stop thinking about getting your book published for a few minutes and do a little window shopping for other people’s books? If so, keep reading, because today’s newsletter is a celebration of new scholarly books that came out in 2022.

I first want to share a bunch of books that I’m particularly excited about because I worked closely with these authors. In some cases these are books where I served as a developmental editor on the manuscript itself. I no longer do this kind of 1-1 work with book manuscripts (because I am focused on book proposals and my online programs these days), but it’s exciting to see projects that I worked on several years ago finally hit shelves and websites.

Other books on this list were ones where I directly advised the authors on their proposals. Many of the authors are alums of my Book Proposal Accelerator going back to the summer of 2019. (I’ll be admitting another cohort in mid-2023.)

Finally, I’m shouting out books by authors who said they benefited from reading this newsletter and The Book Proposal Book, or who used my self-paced Book Proposal Shortcut program to craft their proposals. It means a ton to me to know that my advice has indirectly helped all these scholars achieve their publishing goals.

If you are tempted to keep thinking about your own book project while perusing these, pay attention to the titles and one-liners for these books (which I’ve copied from the publishers’ websites). Those who have been through my programs or read The Book Proposal Book will know that I encourage authors to come up with one-liners early on in the process as a way to quickly convey the appeal and intended audience of their books. Maybe the ones you see here will inspire you!

I’m so proud to have played a small part in the journeys of these books from idea to finished product. I hope that some of them will look interesting enough to you that you’ll click through and place an order or ask your library to purchase (I get no kickbacks from the links below, btw). And if you’re currently working on a book project and would like to work with me on your pitch, please check out my programs and I’ll look forward to featuring your book in a future round-up!

Note: this post might get cut off in your email client — just click through to see the complete list of books on the web.

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Books by Manuscript Works clients

Marika Cifor’s Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS, University of Minnesota Press

Delves deep into the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive

Elizabeth Ellcessor’s In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality, New York University Press

A much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our lives

Marzia Milazzo’s Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power, Northwestern University Press

A study of anti-Blackness and white supremacy across four continents demonstrates that colorblindness is neither new nor a subtype of racist ideology, but a constitutive technology of racism

Karine E. Peschard’s Seed Activism: Patent Politics and Litigation in the Global South, MIT Press

How lawsuits around intellectual property in Brazil and India are impacting the patentability of plants and seeds, farmers' rights, and the public interest

Nick Seaver’s Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation, University of Chicago Press

Meet the people who design the algorithms that capture our musical tastes

Autumn Womack’s The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930, University of Chicago Press

Kristin M. Peterson’s Unruly Souls: The Digital Activism of Muslim and Christian Feminists, Rutgers University Press

Amid growing digital activism to address gender-based violence, institutional racism, and homophobia in U.S. society, Unruly Souls explores the intersectional feminist activism among young people within Islam and Evangelical Christianity

Lauryl Tucker’s Unexpected Pleasures: Parody, Queerness, and Genre in 20th-Century British Fiction, Clemson University Press

Explores the connection between genre parody and queerness in twentieth-century British fiction

Cory Barker’s Social TV: Multiscreen Content and Ephemeral Culture, University Press of Mississippi

An engaging study that tracks the rise and fall of television’s attempts to capture viewer attention on multiple screens

Rosemary Clark-Parsons’s Networked Feminism: How Digital Media Makers Tranformed Gender Justice Movements, University of California Press

Tells the story of how activists have used media to reconfigure what feminist politics and organizing look like in the United States

Catherine Helen Gibson’s Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic, Oxford University Press

Examines the meteoric rise of ethnographic mapmaking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a form of visual and material culture that gave expression to territorialised visions of nationhood

Aynne Kokas’s Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty, Oxford University Press

Argues that China is emerging as the major shaper of global information and technology governance, in part through the United States' lack of attention to internet policy

Caitlin E. Lawson’s Just Like Us: Digital Debates on Feminism and Fame, Rutgers University Press

Examines the rise of celebrity feminism, its intersections with digital culture, and its complicated relationships with race, sexuality, capitalism, and misogyny

Sophie Mützel’s Making Sense: Markets from Stories in New Breast Cancer Therapeutics, Stanford University Press

Combining theories of economic and cultural sociology, Mützel shows how stories are integral for the emergence of new markets

Tisha Dejmanee’s Postfeminism, Postrace and Digital Politics: Consuming Asian American Food Blogs, Routledge

How Asian American women bloggers challenge dominant race and gender discourses through the practice of food blogging

Fredrika Thelandersson’s 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health: Profitable Vulnerability and Sad Girl Culture, Palgrave MacMillan

Takes a feminist media studies approach to examine mental health in magazines and on social media

Kevin Driscoll’s The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media, Yale University Press

The untold story about how the internet became social, and why this matters for its future

Reighan Gillam’s Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media, University of Illinois Press

An eye-opening union of analysis and fieldwork, Visualizing Black Lives examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil

Kerry Ratigan’s Local Politics and Social Policy in China: Let Some Get Healthy First, Cambridge University Press

Benjamin H. Kim’s The God Who Is With Us: Theology of Mission in the Doctrine of Revelation, Lexington

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Books by Manuscript Works Readers

Jeremiah Coogan’s Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity, Oxford University Press

Dan DiPiero’s Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life, University of Michigan Press

Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton’s Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art: The Black Female Fantastic, Routledge

Renee Knake Jefferson and Hannah Brenner Johnson’s Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, New York University Press

Laura Kremmel’s Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies, University of Wales Press

Sarah Lamdan’s Data Cartels: The Companies that Control and Monopolize Our Information, Stanford University Press

Benjamin Miller’s Distant Readings of Disciplinarity: Knowing and Doing in Composition/Rhetoric Dissertations, Utah State University Press

Kristin A. Olbertson’s The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts: 1690–1776, Cambridge University Press

Cassidy Puckett’s Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens, University of Chicago Press

Betsy Rohaly Smoot’s Parker Hitt: The Father of American Military Cryptology, University Press of Kentucky

Adam M. Rosen’s You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa! The Year’s Work on The Room, the Worst Movie Ever Made, Indiana University Press

Jane Barker and D. Scharie Tavcer’s Women and the Criminal Justice System: A Canadian Perspective, Emond

Iva Vukušić’s Serbian Paramilitaries and the Breakup of Yugoslavia: State Connections and Patterns of Violence, Routledge

Andrea Walton’s Women at Indiana University: 150 Years of Experiences and Contributions, Indiana University Press

Mara C. Ostfeld and Nicole D. Yadon’s Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America, Russell Sage

Karen Zgoda’s Active Learning Lessons, Activities, and Assignments for the Modern Social Work Educator, Routledge

Thanks for scrolling this far! And thank you to all the authors who shared their new publications with me. I’ll be back next week with a preview of what Manuscript Works will be up to in 2023. See you then.